Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Draft Programme to Be Submitted to the 16th Party Congress, Town Hall, Stoke Newington, London, October 7, 8, 9th, 1939
In Britain today there are not only extremes of wealth and poverty; there is also continuous waste of human lives and material resources.
All the resources are present to provide plenty for all. But the monopolist owning class, in pursuit of its selfish interests, neglects and misuses the nation's resources and the nation's labour. Whole areas, once great centres of production, have been allowed to become derelict. Machinery is destroyed, factories and shipyards closed down. Agriculture is declining. Science is frustrated and its work distorted in the interests of profit. The almost unlimited possibilities of wealth which science and invention have brought within reach are left undeveloped. The existing social order is not even able to organise the labour of the people. For the past two decades over one million workers, and most often over two million workers, willing and able to work and produce, have been unemployed.
The proportion of parasitic services and luxury occupa tions grows at the expense of productive industry. Only a little over half the employed workers are today engaged in productive industry, while commerce and finance, and personal service', are recorded in the official returns as the nation's principal occupations, in which the highest numbers of persons are engaged.
Large numbers of people, outside the ranks of the working class, are living in idleness, drawing dividendswithout playing any part in production. The State debt is swollen to half the total national, wealth, and the interest on it paid to the rich more than absorbs all the income-tax and sur-tax paid by the rich.
Rent, interest and profit weigh ever more heavily on production and on the working people. The vital forces of the nation are drained by recurring economic crises.
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